Historically barter, haggling, sale by a set-price and auctions have been some of the traditional ways to negotiate the exchange of goods and commodities. An issue with vehicle resale is that there are no standardized ways to capture vehicle data. Similarly when a user wants an accurate appraisal of the vehicle if information about the vehicle is missing or misrepresented, an accurate appraisal has not been possible.
An appraisal is an estimate of an item's worth, usually performed by an expert and may be used as a mechanism to define the asking price for an item. Many factors influence the assessment of a vehicle and it is subjective.
Online auctions for vehicles are common where a wide variety of off-lease, commercial and dealer vehicles may be sold to other dealers and the public. Some dealers may auction one or more vehicles to other dealers who in turn sell these to the public via their showrooms.
An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder. Bidding is the act of participating in an auction by offering to purchase an item for sale. Prices are bid by buyers and asked (or offered) by sellers. Auctions are publicly and privately seen in several contexts and almost anything can be sold at an auction. E-Bidding or Electronic Bidding—is a type of auction, whereby a person may make a bid without being physically present at an auction or where the entire auction is taking place on the Internet.
Auctions are prone to collusion and manipulation if the bidders are not fully aware of the value of the item being auctioned. The vehicle may be remote, where only digital representation e.g. photos and videos of it being available. Thus it is easy to hide any blemishes or other kind of damage. For example if a vehicle has been wrecked and repaired, it has lost a certain value, but if the bidders are not aware of the history of the vehicle they may end up overpaying for it.
When consumers want to sell their vehicles online they typically have to create their own ads. Since each consumer may possibly take a different number of photos and photos may be taken from different angles each ad becomes different. Additionally consumers can often forget, or choose to purposely ignore the areas that they want to hide e.g. accident damage. For the buyer then it is difficult to compare similar vehicles as each ad may have different or incomplete or misleading information in it. Similarly when a user wants an accurate appraisal of their vehicle it is important that all relevant data about the vehicle be captured so that appraisers are provided a full disclosure and can provide an accurate appraisal.
It would be desirable to have a system that enables such data to be captured in a reliable, complete and standardized way.